Transcript for:
Exploring Behaviorism and Social Engineering

Give me a baby and I can make any kind of man. These are the words of John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism. According to this worldview, the behavior of organisms, including human beings, is predictable and therefore controllable.

In 1920, at John Hopkins University, Watson experimented on several babies ranging in age from three months to a year. The experiments were remarkable in their simplicity. He would present a candle to infants to see if they were afraid of fire. He would introduce animals to their environment to see if the children were afraid of them naturally, or only after a traumatic experience.

He would make a hissing noise and observe the results. Watson learned that newborn babies had no fear of the dark. He also learned, however, that such fear could be conditioned. And so it was with rabbits. This baby, known as Little Albert, initially found delight in touching a rabbit.

Yet, as Watson began to clang a steel rod and claw a hammer behind the child's head whenever he touched the creature, the reaction became not one of delight, but terror. Soon, the mere sight of the rabbit would elicit fear, even when no noise was provided, a fear that also extended to objects and textures of a similar type. From his experiments, Watson reached a radical conclusion which would come to define political and social engineering in the 20th century.

The driving force in society, he claimed, is not love, but fear. You could speculate about why the rat was so useful. I mean, one thing, it reproduced really fast. Another thing is that people were not affectionate towards rats, so you didn't really need to worry about ethical objections, unless something truly horrible was done.

Finally, I guess you could see the rat as a metaphor for an animal that is tractable. Running a rat through a maze, it's a pretty understandable metaphor for most of us of running through life. And in fact, if you look at the history of the maze, it goes back through early Christian and even into Greek societies as kind of a metaphor for life. The idea that you somehow wind your way through a maze. Of course, in the Christian tradition, the maze is full of meaning and you're eventually trying to get to God.

It's kind of a pilgrim's progress. Whereas in modern society people like Nietzsche said that, you know, life was like a maze that you could never run to the end of. But in the 20th century in American laboratories, the maze was once again adopted as a symbol of hope.

Not a hope that one could get to God or to get to a meaningful life, but the hope that people could actually be controlled in a very scientific manner. That social life could be remade on the basis of scientific principles. In the roll call of scientific piracy is that which surrounds B.F. Skinner. Work has led to the formulation of the science of human behavior.

which finds behavior to be predictable, therefore controllable. And for this, he has been both applauded and attacked. The science of behavior is based on the principles of operant conditioning.

These principles and their practice have recently become known as behavior modification, sacrilege to some because it has to do with methods by which man can shape the behavior of others. But far from being a scheme to control people without their knowledge, it allows man to study and analyze behavior and to apply its healing potential to such fields as education, medicine, and psychology. Behaviorism, as it suggests, is the study of behavior.

It's the notion that really all that matters is behavior and not the thought processes that lie behind behavior. And it also is very much a method of control. I'm waiting for it to turn counterclockwise now. And then I reinforce that movement.

In behaviorism there's the whole idea of behavior modification, where you can use various kinds of techniques to modify people's behaviors so that they stop doing what you don't want them to do and they start doing what you want them to do. So I think it's the scientific aspect of it and the controlling aspect of it that defines behaviorism. The philosophy of behaviorism is deceptively simple. It suggests that organisms can be viewed as flesh and blood machines. Like machines, we require fuel.

Like machines, we can be put to work for a specific cause. Like machines, we can be repaired or redesigned for new purposes. And like machines, we can be compelled into performing a certain action at the push of a button. The science of human behavior had always intrigued philosophers, but it wasn't until the Enlightenment and the era of capitalist industrialization that men began to think that they could control lifeforms in the same way they controlled objects.

Prior to that, when we think of the Middle Ages, even much of the Renaissance, the idea was that things were interrelated, they were organically a whole. In that sense, the Middle Ages had a lot in common with traditional peasant or folk cultures around the world. Things are seen as basically being a kind of giant web of influence.

Everything was like that. ...a chain where if you plucked one part, the other part would resonate. That was the previous view, a worldview that had great advantages and also great disadvantages. With the scientific revolution in the 17th century, that view altered in which things were... seen as mechanical parts that interrelated.

The mechanical philosophy of the 17th century was a very crucial step in the rise of capitalism, because capitalism does that. For example, it sees the Earth at a distance. It sees the Earth.

as something to be mined and exploited. It sees the Earth as dead. So capitalism and mechanical philosophy went together very well.

And that in many ways made possible the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modernity. And there again we can say there are great advantages to it. and also great disadvantages to it. Civilizations usually come as a package deal.

There's a light side and a dark side. Every civilization believes in its own propaganda, so it tends to emphasize the light side and forgets about the shadows. For the behaviorists, it started with plants.

Julius Sachs at the University of Würzburg enumerated a set of tropisms, defined as any directed response by an organism to a constant stimulus. An example is the way an ivy plant will turn its leaves toward the window in order to gain exposure to sunlight. Sack's protege, Jacques Loeb, took it to the next level by creating a stable of insects he called durable machines. In his laboratory at the University of Chicago, he trained cockroaches through the use of simple tropisms.

Because of the insect's bilateral symmetry, a light shone on one side caused it to move in the other direction. In Russia, Ivan Pavlov moved on to animals. The term Pavlov dog has become synonymous with a conditioned reflex. Pavlov discovered that a dog would salivate when it began to associate a stimulus, such as a ringing bell, with food.

significant connection between the two. His dissertation in 1906 was about the kinesthetic of the rat as it navigated a maze and his idea was that he could remove one by one the senses of a rat, like remove its ability to see, remove its ability to hear, its ability to feel, and then see whether the rat could still make its way through a maze that it had been trained to navigate. So in his mind, rats were always stand-ins for human beings and human subjects. He called it psychology as as the behaviorist views it. And it was basically his manifesto for behaviorism.

And in it, he declared that behaviorism was a science of human behavior, and that there was a method available to make a technology by which human beings could be shaped in any way that a scientist desired. Watson always was interested in control. One finds this theme throughout his work. He said, give me a baby and I can make any kind of man. Watson.

continued to experiment on babies and other living things until his star began to fade. At the end of his life, he wrote nostalgically of his failure to put together what he considered the ultimate experiment in social engineering, a multi-ethnic baby farm. I sometimes think I regret, Watson wrote, that I could not have a group of infant farms where I could have brought up 30 pure-blooded Negroes on one, 30 pure-blooded Anglo-Saxons on another. and 30 Chinese on a third, all under similar conditions.

Watson's dream may seem bizarre to modern ears, but implicit in the concept was a real desire to see the question of race answered once and for all. He was not unlike thousands of other researchers at prestigious universities across the United States. In the late 19th century, alongside the rise of Jim Crow segregation, In the 1890s, what you saw is that corporations developed a much more elaborate way to justify the fact that the wealthy corporate elite, which was without exception white, to explain the reason why.

That reason has its basis in what became known as the eugenics movement. You were born with either good genes or not good genes. In the case of Miss Mason, I can see no reason for the operation that's been recommended.

The girl is perfectly normal. She's hard-working and has a good reputation. Do you know anything about her family background? Yes, Your Honor, I do.

There are several other children, aren't there? Yes. What is their condition?

One is a cripple. Two others might be classed as feeble-minded. Isn't the oldest son in jail? Oh, yes, I believe so.

And knowing all that, you still contend that this girl should be allowed to bring more people like that into the world? Those who have good genes should be encouraged to reproduce, and those who are, quote, unfit should be discouraged from reproducing, from having children. That eventually went into forced sterilization programs, which started in the United States, directed against African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants in particular.

Eugenics was... A pseudoscience rooted in the idea that you can, A, recognize pre-biologically determined differences in people based on their ethnicity, and that, B, you could construct a policy that favors some ethnic groups over others, both in terms of immigration policy and in terms of integration into U.S. society based on this hierarchy of heredity. The pseudo-science, this philosophy, gained a lot of traction in the United States amongst the industrialist class, especially at a time when immigrant workers, who made up a large percentage, if not the majority of workers at the turn of the 20th century, were beginning to form unions, were beginning to create collective organizations, their own political parties, to challenge the conditions of industrialization.

which were horrific and oppressive. It took root in the universities. It took root amongst the highest offices of government. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, Republican president, believed that and even stated his belief that a lot of social problems were associated with inferior races. We see ultimately this philosophy is going to play an important role in shaping immigration policy after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially It creates a national quota system that favors immigrants based on their ethnicity and based on their nationality.

One fact that is important to understand about the eugenics movement is that it was created and funded by the corporate elites that ruled America coming into the 20th century. It was the Rockefellers, the Harrimans. the Kellogg family of the cereal.

They funded these research programs at universities. All of it created, funded by these corporate families, the Rockefellers in particular. played a particularly devious role. As the eugenics movement developed, it went in a really horrible direction.

The Rockefellers would play a key role in the advancement of social engineering in the years between the Great Wars. Between 1922 and 1929, an arm of the Rockefeller Foundation gave out almost 50 million dollars toward the pursuit of the social sciences around the world. According to historian Judith C. Lander, the spur was a need for better organization in society at large.

What had begun as a public relations plight to assuage public anger in the face of unscrupulous business practices and violent suppression of working people, the Rockefeller Charities would set out to change society as a whole. The Yale Institute of Human Relations was founded in 1929. It was given us $7 million initially from the Rockefeller Foundation just a couple of months before Black Tuesday occurred in October of 1929. So according to my calculations, if you factor in all the money that Rockefeller eventually gave the Yale Institute and the other monies from the government, this was the largest social science project that's ever been funded in history. The desire for better order was epitomized by the Hawthorne experiments, which created a new model for organizing and supervising industrial workers.

They are widely credited with putting the human factor back into industrial relations. Yet, as with previous experiments in the workplace, the ultimate effect would be to increase the power of the great capitalists at the expense of everyone else. The story of what is now termed scientific management, or Taylorism, begins decades earlier, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was hired by Bethlehem Steel to increase efficiency in the industrial workplace. Once upon a time, The greatest theorist of the free market, Adam Smith, had warned that division of labor would create a catastrophe for human society. Frederick Taylor disagreed.

In Taylor's view, there was far too little division of labor. Factories, could be run far more efficiently if tasks were mechanized and broken down even further. In a series of experiments, he set out to reduce every task performed in a factory into individual units, measuring how long they took and setting targets for workers to meet.

On its surface, scientific management seems like an excellent idea. Increased efficiency allows more products to be manufactured in a shorter amount of time. Yet there was another, more sinister motivation lurking in the background. Ever since the 19th century, machinery.

Machine shops had been a bastion of skilled labor. What this meant was that a considerable degree of power remained concentrated on the shop floor. The same skills that made production possible also enabled machinists to challenge management when they felt they were in need of more. they were being treated unfairly. For management, this was an unacceptable bargaining chip.

For Taylor, it was simply inefficient. You find that a man does not change very much, whatever else changes. They boast in the airplane world, it will take some other countries a generation to catch up with our quality.

And it is not because their engineers are inferior, but because our ordinary workmen have a traditional skill behind them. Taylorism was certainly about de-skilling. It was about studying what skilled workers did to decompose those tasks into their basic elements and then teaching people to do specific aspects. of it without learning the entire set of or array of activities that were involved and are involved for a skilled person. In that sense, it's a mechanism of control because you dictate to people, well, well, you do this part of the entire task and you don't do anything else, and you dictate to 8, 10, or 12 people various specific aspects of the whole task rather than allowing a skilled person to decide how the entire task should be done.

So there's very much control involved there. To the degree that this involves de-skilling and involves control, it tends to take power away from workers. It takes power away from...

therefore the collectivity of workers and therefore makes them less likely to be rebellious makes them less likely to form various kinds of movements that would operate against let's say broadly the capitalist system so this is a something that management thinks is a good idea for the workers but is not a good idea for them they have to be free to be to be creative and in fact Henry Ford in his biography said exactly that. Basically he said something like, you know, I'm too smart to have these kind of rational principles imposed on me, but those stupid workers out there, we need to impose those principles on them because they wouldn't know what to do if we didn't impose those principles on them. So rationalization, McDonaldization is always something that those on top want to impose on the bottom, but something they don't want to affect their work at all. Henry Ford, in effect, invented the automobile assembly line and more generally the system that came to be known as Fordism. One aspect of Fordism had to do with hierarchical control over workers, and more specifically, the control over workers by the assembly line.

So all the worker... What you might do, for example, is put a hubcap on a car as that car went past as it was being constructed on the assembly line. So instead of a thinking, creative, skilled worker, you had a kind of mindless kind of worker who repetitively did the same task over and over again.

Well, that kind of worker is robot-like. You are forced into a series of robot-like actions. The most interesting thing for me about McDonaldization or Weber's broader concept of rationalization is the idea of the irrationality of rationality.

That these rational systems inevitably spawn all sorts of irrationalities. consequences. This is supposed to be an efficient system, yet it ends up being very often inefficient. It's dehumanizing one of the kind of ultimate irrationalities from my point of view. In their study, Where Have All the Robots Gone?

, Harold Shepard and Neil Herrick confirmed what many had long suspected. People trapped in an unrewarding work life were not only more likely to be dissatisfied, but were also more likely to suffer from low self-esteem, a feeling of helplessness, alienation, and to be plagued by a variety of mental disorders. The workers who were the most dissatisfied and whose mental health was the most impaired were the least likely to vote or participate in community organizations.

If you work in an environment where you're beaten up all the time, well, you're beaten up. Moreover, if you work in an environment that is so fragmented, that so robs you of dignity and so robs you of the expression of your own capacities, then you'll be diminished. You'll be deadened.

You'll be bored. You will be reduced in your potentials, and you are not too likely to take initiative in other domains either. This is why Taylorism is pursued. This is why fragmenting of work... is pursued.

It weakens the workers, not just on the job, but in their communities too, which is what you want to do so that they don't take more of the income from themselves, thus reducing profits for the elites. So it's perfectly sensible policy, a perfectly sensible approach, a devil's approach, but a perfectly sensible approach from the point of view of those at the top who are trying to stay there and who are trying to advance. Moreover, if they don't, they just get wiped out. So it's not even really an option. What you'd have to do is to create a new kind of economy in which these situations and these conditions don't restrict our options.

The corporate entity, corporate person, it's not really a person, but call it an entity, is it pathological? Answer yes. Why?

Because it drives toward profit regardless of the broader implications. It doesn't matter if your drive toward profit induces pain and suffering, promotes, you know, generates black lung disease in a mine, or pollutes the environment, or literally destroys the society. It doesn't matter. You're forced by the nature of the social relations.

inside and among corporations, the market system, to pursue, to accumulate, to pursue profits. If hierarchy is the defining characteristic of scientific management, it should not be surprising that it was met with great praise, not only by the capitalist world, but by fascists and authoritarian communists. Mussolini set up a propaganda arm of his government. to promote Taylorism, while Lenin wrote in Pravda in 1918 that we must introduce in Russia the study and the teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adaptation.

workers in Russia were unimpressed with scientific management. A major contributing factor to the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 was the introduction of Taylor's techniques. Immediately after the rebellion was crushed, a government document on rationalization spoke of the instinctive mistrust of all workers toward all kinds of experiments directed at extracting greater productivity from them. Workers at Kronstadt had envisioned a decentralized system where they would actually own and control their own work and resources but lenin had something different in mind socialism lenin wrote is merely state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly the new means of control have been created not by us but by capitalism in its military imperialist stage The Leninist system was one of the greatest blows that socialism suffered in the 20th century, maybe second only to fascism.

I mean, as Lenin took power, among its first acts, along with Trotsky, were to destroy the socialist institutions that had arisen in the... pre-Bolshevik period. Soviet factory councils, constituent assembly which was dominated by left social revolutionaries, largely peasant based. And of course they went to war against the anarchists.

A major war. to try to wipe them out, the Makhno's army and so on. And there was a sort of a logic behind it.

They were orthodox Marxists, unlike Marx, incidentally. They believed in a version of Marxism that said that revolution can't come in a backward peasant society, which is what Russia was. It was what we would now call a third world country, an undeveloped peasant society, with some development, but owned by the West and so on.

I mean, a highly... educated and productive intellectual class, but that's also true of third world societies. So they thought this couldn't happen, so therefore we have to drive this backward population through industrialization by force, and then later on by the iron laws of history and so on and so forth will come the socialism.

Of course, it's all nonsense, but... So they essentially laid the basis for a totalitarian system with an ideological... doctrine behind it. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I actually wrote an article saying this is a victory for socialism, a small victory for socialism.

It just couldn't get published. Nobody knew what I was talking about. The world's two major propaganda systems, the West and the Soviet Union, they both decided, determined to use the word socialism to refer to the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union.

I mean the West did it to discredit socialism. the Bolsheviks did it to try to gain the credit associated with genuine socialism. Well, when the world's two propaganda systems agree, it's going to be very hard for people to extricate themselves from it. So now socialism, the term, has been degraded to mean the form of totalitarianism instituted by Lenin and carried through by Stalin. And I was going back to Spain.

It was entirely natural that they should be in the lead. destroying the popular revolution. The Kunin, much earlier, had predicted all of this.

He said that in the future, there will be two forms. One form will be they'll take over the state and they'll create a red bureaucracy, which will be the most vile and brutal regime the world has ever seen. And there are others who will understand that they can't take over the state, so they have to serve concentrated private power and state power.

And they'll be the technical intelligence. who implement the policies of the masters in what we now call liberal democracies. It's a very good prediction.

It's one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true, which is one of the reasons why nobody ever studies it. It's much too dangerous, too insightful. In both the Soviet Union and the United States, ruling elites would set out to master the psyche of the average worker. And from the Hawthorne...

experiments came new insights. Researchers found that the very act of allowing workers to talk about their feelings reduced the possibility of agitation and rebellion. It made workers feel as if they mattered, even if the social relations remained fundamentally the same. The Hawthorne experiments, initially it was to be a purely scientific study and science tries to get rid of unnecessary things, let's make everything equal so. There aren't any other factors than the ones we're controlling for.

So they were trying to see what effect changing the lighting would have on how workers felt and also how much they produced. It wasn't really any quality concern but quantity of production and worker satisfaction, which will ultimately affect the quantity of work as well. But to do that they said, well, we don't want to have Employees being disgruntled about this and that being a factor. So we will discuss with the employees what we are going to do.

There were complete discussions and the employees would suggest trying this and trying that. And what they found was no matter what changes they made, Including putting the lighting back to where it had been before the experiment began to see what difference that made. Every time they made a change, having discussed it with employees, production went up and employee satisfaction went up. Now, if it had been done in a democratic context, immediately the reaction would have been, let's look at the participation. But this was done in a hierarchical context.

So what came out of it was a public relations school. Industrial relations is going to be developed out of it. And most of that, then, was taken as a way of trying to control employees by trying to manipulate them ideologically.

Not that managers had before, but now there was a whole school of doing that. I would say the wrong lesson was learned. Yeah, put out a suggestion box. So that employees can feel they're being asked, but you don't necessarily pay any attention to them. In a real teamwork organization or a participatory organization, employees get to take each other into account.

They begin caring about each other. I've seen this going into a plant and seeing it develop over time, the amount of participation increase and the attitudes of employees. ...begin to grow and the care that people have about each other.

And then that can easily expand to care about the community. And also work can be reorganized because people have a say, there are better ways to do things, if we are treated better, we'll work better, and so forth. Now the broader social impact of doing these kinds of things, as we've seen earlier...

Hierarchical control makes people feel worse about themselves. It creates more mental illness, creates bad relations outside the workplace. Well, if people spend most of their time in a collaborative workplace, they become more collaborative. They care more about each other.

You can have a democratic corporation, a worker-owned business, and a worker-owned business that really is managed by the workers, that uses the corporate form. And that gives us some... because it's possible, at least theoretically, to reform corporations. Participatory economics is the name for a different way to do the economy. It's a different approach to accomplishing production, consumption and allocation, economic functions, different than what?

Different than capitalism and different than what went under the name socialism, but I tried to describe as coordinatorism, as this class of... of engineers and managers and doctors and lawyers being at the top. So participatory economics, so Power Econ is an alternative to all of that.

It's a different kind of economy. In a participatory economy, in a good economy, instead of organizing economic life to keep a small sector of people on top and to enrich them beyond any sensibility, and to utilize... productive apparatus even when it entails doing things that are a complete waste of time, building missiles that will never be used, on and on and on. Instead of all that, we would produce and distribute for purposes of human fulfillment and development.

You don't need only advertising, you need sensible information rather than people competing with advertising that has nothing to do with actually communicating what the benefits and costs of production are. You don't need all this military production, of course not. You don't need nor do you want to generate all kinds of activity and product which doesn't make people better off.

As workers around the globe continue to struggle for workplace democracy and equal rights, mass production continues apace. Taylorism, combined with human relations, make up the cornerstones of worker management in the 21st century. in china scientific management has taken on nightmarish proportions so extensive is the division of labor that millions of people are forced to perform roughly the same motion thousands of times a day in the united states In the United States, workers in some assembly plants are required to be in continual motion for up to 57 seconds a minute. In Indonesia, sweatshops owned by corporations like Nike chart productivity down to a thousandth of a second.

In offices and service industries, corporations are increasingly resorting to video surveillance and computerized monitoring. One of Frederick Taylor's descendants, John Taylor Gatto, has rebelled against his forebear's legacy. An award-winning teacher, he has also rebelled against the state of his profession.

The key is the word compulsion. The idea of drawing all children, all young people, into some universal program administered by the leader or the leaders is as old as Plato, probably older. But nowhere on earth was that able to be imposed until Northern Germany, under the military rule of the Prussians, finally imposed that in 1818, so in the first, second decade of the 19th century.

That is the first time. It was announced in other places, but never was it able to be successfully administered because the idea is so crazy. And so damaging inherently that people simply disobeyed the law. The experience of Prussian Germany was that it was possible to convert sovereign human beings into human resources. That's a translation of a German compound.

And that by making these people incomplete, making them... unable to think in context, but they could be converted into specialist tools for management, scientific management. Horace Mann was hired by the railroad and coal interests of New England to bring about compulsion.

He had No interest in schooling. He was an ambitious young politician. He did get compulsion laws passed in 1852. Once it was in Massachusetts, it spread very, very slowly.

It wasn't for 15 more years that another state followed suit, so it hardly was a gift to the... Populist portion of America, I smile a little bit when I say that because the mythology is that it was greeted everywhere with great enthusiasm. Not only did parents resist compulsory schooling, they sometimes did so violently. So vehement was the opposition in Barnstable on Cape Cod that state militia were brought in to march children to school under armed guard.

A primary reason why the mass of the American population resisted compulsory schooling was a widespread belief that its purpose had little to do with education and everything to do with control. Their suspicions were well-founded. An undercurrent of class warfare runs through early American education documents.

The U.S. Bureau of Education Circular of Information for April 1872 explains that inculcating knowledge teaches workers to be able to perceive and calculate their grievances, thus making them more redoubtable foes in labor struggles. Such an enabling is bound to retard the growth of industry. Sixteen years later in the report of the Senate Committee on Education is equally explicit.

We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes. The first red scare in my Judgment is the trigger event for the embedment of compulsion schooling in the United States. The Red Scare of 1848 is probably the reason that one American state fell under the compulsion regimen.

There are literally thousands of books from... The period 1880 to say 1920 roughly, that deal with how you scientifically engineer a factory or a church congregation or young people in school. School which followed a general outline of converting kids into obedient tools.

Now took on a very, very mechanistic aspect under this surge of scientific engineering. In 1903, the Atlantic Monthly called for adoption of scientific management in schools. Prominent education theorist William C. Bagley stressed a need for unquestioned obedience. The new system would train children for life in 20th century America, their role to fulfill the needs of commerce, industry, and government.

In the community with the best education, more shoppers, more merchandise moving, a higher average of per capita sales. In the other community... fewer shoppers. Maybe things will look up in the long run.

In the first community, there's a larger magazine circulation per 1,000 population. A much smaller circulation in the second community, a decline in demand. The student of typing, shorthand, and business machines becomes a producer upon graduation, a tax-developed community asset.

He prepares for radio and electronics. His future promises a profit on the taxes invested in him. As education raises the cultural level, so it must also introduce youth to the know-how of production and stir interest in precision, efficiency, and service.

With graduation, the community receives a new supply of young people who want a better life on the one hand and who have the ability to work for it on the other. Now the tax investment Returns to the taxpayer. In order to aid in the process, the Gary Plan was introduced.

It had a new organizational scheme in which different subjects would be taught by different departments. Similar to the breaking down of factory jobs under Taylorism, students would be herded from classroom to classroom in order to digest a stream of standardized factual information, like Pavlov's dogs, they would do so at the ring of a bell. Children go where I say Where we send me And I'll send one Baby, baby, a bomba Born, born, born in Bethlehem, children go where I send thee, where I send thee.

The first lesson I saw was the terrible confusion that's in any school as people race a bath at bell marked intervals. The time honored experience of mental development is that it occurs with strong concentration, not with fragmented attention. Class position, you will not find the doctor's son, however ignorant he is, in the class with the marginalized skin.

Indifference is wonderful. This is a factory to create indifference to intellectual things, to ideas. They have to be whipped, ordered, and disordered.

to do anything or just as bad they have to be offered bribes to do it. Emotional dependency, sure. Probably half of these six years 60 million kids who attend school in the United States, removed from their own families at a very vulnerable age, become emotionally dependent on a pat on the head, a smile, avoiding an insult. Intellectual dependency.

In spite of rhetoric to the contrary, a teacher's nightmare is invested in the education of the poor. in those kids, if any, who actually have learned how to think for themselves. The teacher's job is not only to convey bits of information that should not be challenged, but also to convey how you connect those bits of information, but not practice in doing that for yourself.

You memorize someone else's connection. One, two. is a circle. Billy Henloff.

A circle is a closed curve in which all endpoints on the circumference are equally distanced from the center points. Very good. Provisional self-esteem, this really ties into the grades, the test scores, the signs of approval by the teacher. You're allowed to feel good about yourself if an authority...

issues a signal that you can do that. On the other hand, if the authority condemns you, the only way you can feel good about yourself is to become an outlaw. What are we trying to do?

If our goal is to help kids become critical thinkers, lifelong learners who really enjoy thinking and reading and playing with numbers and ideas, if we want to help them become good learners and good people who can create and sustain a functioning democracy, then education would look very different from the way it looks right now, at least in our culture. We would have to question the use of grades. What research finds is that when kids are trying to get good grades in school, three things tend to happen.

They begin to lose interest in the learning itself. Now the purpose is just to get a good grade rather than to engage with the question or problem at hand. Second, they tend to think less deeply and retain knowledge for a shorter period of time compared to kids who don't have any grades.

And third, they tend to pick the easiest possible tasks. That's not because they're being lazy, it's because they're being rational. If we tell kids we want to see a better future, we want to see a better future. better report card we want to see higher grades naturally they'll pick the shortest book or the easiest project because that maximizes the chance of achieving that goal so regardless of what your your goal is if there's if you're interested in assessing kids and teachers and schools to see are we doing a good job here you would never need tests in order to see whether kids are learning and we're they need help and you would never need grades to report the results of the evaluation we place on those assessments.

We would certainly do away with standardized testing, the kind of testing used in particular states or provinces where everyone takes a test and then we would takes the same test and then you compare everyone's scores. These tests tend to measure what matters least. It tends to be a good marker for family income, because what standardized tests mostly measure is the size of the houses near a school. But it's the case that some of our deepest thinking kids just don't do well on tests.

Some kids who get great scores have never had an original idea in their lives. Well, I thought you just judged by tests. Oh, no, there are many. other things besides tests that we use.

Of course, we do consider a child's general ability and the way he scores on standardized tests, but that's not all. Competition builds character. In fact, what we find is that by any reasonable notion of character in terms of psychological health or self-esteem, that competition undermines that and creates a kind of neurosis, because we come to think of ourselves as good and comfortable. competent only to the extent that we have defeated other people.

And so we're always playing this desperate king of the mountain game where we're all worried about triumphing over other people and stepping on their faces and looking at them as if they're going to step on our faces. That has two effects. One is it's horrible for us in terms of psychological development because there's a perpetual sense of disease and anxiety. But second, it very logically has a destructive effect on our relationships. We compete because we're raised that way, not because we're born that way.

I mean, take for example the belief in survival of the fittest, which is seen as a Darwinian notion. In fact, Charles Darwin never said that. even use the phrase survival of the fittest.

That was coined by a right-wing social thinker in the 19th century named Herbert Spencer who tried to corrupt Darwin's thinking to his own reactionary political purposes. What Darwin talked about was natural selection, which means that the individual organism that's best able to adapt to a changing environment is more likely to be around to survive and reproduce. But that's not the case with Now that doesn't specify competition as a mechanism.

In fact, often the active avoidance of competition, if not the deliberate pursuit of cooperative strategies, turns out to make it more likely that organisms and entire species will survive. The research consistently shows that competition not only isn't necessary for excellence, but tends to impede excellence on most tasks. And the more challenging the task, the more ingenuity, problem-solving skills are required.

skill it requires, the more competition tends to disrupt that achievement. Excellence pulls in one direction and competition pulls in another. And in fact, another kind of research study corroborates that. If you take a whole bunch of people and give them a task to do, some kind of problem to work out, and half of them are told, See if you can figure out how to do this task.

And the other half are told this is a contest with a prize to whoever wins, whoever does the best job. Study after study after study across cultures, across gender, across ages. Find that the people who compete, who have to compete, end up doing an inferior job on that task.

At the moment, it appears as though much of what happens in schools in North America is really for the convenience of people who have most of the power. There is, if anything, an active discouragement of critical questioning. Corporations claim they want kids who are able to think outside the box, but only so far as they're caught within a larger box that works to the advantage of the free market, which means that the market economy Based on competition, based on economic rather than human considerations, ends up controlling the system.

Today, many people assume that antisocial and even violent behavior by young people is a completely natural phenomenon. Yet anthropological studies reveal this to be a myth. Our widespread use of the term juvenile delinquency exposes not only the failure of modern schooling, but of an important concept given expression by the behaviorists. They called it the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis.

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis was an attempt by behaviorists at Yale to combine their own science of behavior with that of the Freudians. Simply put, When people perceive that they are being prevented from achieving just rewards, their frustration is likely to turn to aggression. This study by the behaviorist Hobart Maurer showed that when rats could not achieve their expected reward, they began to take out their frustrations on each other. The scientist notes that two animals which have lost their hold on the pellet, frustration, will be seen to turn on each other, displaced aggression.

Similarly, In a 1941 experiment, toys were placed behind a wire screen where children could see but not touch them. When they eventually gained access to the toys, their play became considerably more destructive. On the one hand, human beings are not rats.

Armed with the necessary information, we can come to a logical conclusion about who is to blame for our frustrations in life. Rightly or wrongly, we often point the finger squarely back at ourselves. Yet in the hands of politicians and demagogues, frustration and aggression can be a potent tool in deflecting anger onto scapegoats.

They want to throw white children and colored children into the belting part of integration, through out of which will come a conglomerated... A lot of mongrel class of people. We are the Ku Klux Klan. We hate niggas, we hate Jews, we hate faggots, and we hate specks.

We kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians. I said, God damn it, we kill them all. Why kill the elder crackers?

The old, crepit crackers in South Africa. How in the hell you think they got old? They got old, oppressing and...

killing black people. I'm not going to discuss it. If he says murder gets murdered, if a murderer gets murdered or slain, capital punishment, that's fine with me.

Line them up and we'll clean up our nation overnight. with the abortionists might as well get rid of a few of those beasts i'm so sick of them i'm so sick of the brainwashing about islam and muslims and the quran shove it shove it all i'm sick of it get take the music off these throwbacks think they're better than you underneath it all and 90 of them are on welfare speak it out at the supermarket tell them what you think of islam tell them what you think of muslims we're talking about illegal immigration so now in addition to venereal disease in the other leading exports of mexico women with mustaches and the now now we have swine flu and when you scoop up some of the world's lowest of primitives in for mexico and drop it down in the middle of the united states poor without skills without language not sure our culture not sure hygiene haven't been vaccinated look at all the things we take for granted It's millions of leeches from a primitive country. Come here to leech off you. I don't know what happened tonight and I don't know why.

Also, The Gay Agenda and Harry Potter. Professors, the 101 most dangerous academics in America, and that's just a short list of the 30,000, 40,000 of them. They're like termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it's just appalling.

Scapegoating. And the hope is that by... Deflecting the anger of people, which might be directed against the system itself, deflecting the anger against these other people, the system would save itself. In the South, the black people became scapegoats, and you directed the anger of white people. Poor white people in the South were the people who joined the Ku Klux Klan.

These poor white people might have rebelled against the Governments of the South and against the national government, but no, they were told that black people were the source of their problem. He entered the facility heavily armed. Immediately started shooting everybody. It was a local man dressed in battle fatigues who declared, I've killed a thousand, I'm going to kill a thousand more.

41-year-old James Huberti reportedly walked into the restaurant carrying a semi-automatic rifle and two other weapons, enough ammunition to last two hours. Witnesses inside said he fired wildly into the unsuspecting crowd, gathered for a quick evening meal. He fired through windows, hitting people in the street. He fired at men, women, children, and babies. Bullets fly, leaving a local family...

scared to be in their own home. Tonight investigators say hate was driving the man who pulled the trigger. Deputy say last month someone opened fire on the Hashems because they're Muslim. I need to know who hate us that much. Who's, you know, who wants us to die.

Authorities in California are urging Jewish schools and temples to stay alert following a shooting at a synagogue in LA. The attack happened in the same area of Bushwick where another Hispanic immigrant was killed. Vera left a food pantry here at his church in lower Manhattan, carrying his groceries.

He biked across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Bushwick, where police say he was allegedly struck in the head, then thrown off his bike as three black males yelled anti-Mexican slurs. Left-hand side of your screen, you can see the two attackers shove and punch Jack Price, the openly gay victim, now in a medically induced coma. The attack accelerates with both suspects flailing their arms at the helpless 49-year-old. There was utter pandemonium outside the university building as ambulances carted away the injured. Police have now confirmed 14 students dead, all women.

Another dozen people were hurt, caught in a rampage that witnesses called a human hunt, with the gunman yelling, I want women. There's an interesting perspective that comes out of many studies in psychiatric anthropology which suggests that mental illness is not just a standardized, invariant thing like diabetes. For example, diabetes is always the same wherever you are in the world. But mental illness seems to take different forms. Once a person takes leave of reality, once a person abandons the ship of fools, the, uh...

The form that the psychosis takes is often dictated or at least shaped by the dominant culture. Thus, for example, in traditional Ojibwe society where there was a belief that once a person went insane, this is the Wendigo psychosis, that he or she might eat human flesh. And thus a proportion of people who, feeling that they've left reality, no longer feeling control begin to act out the particular form of psychosis that their culture is aware of. Multiple murderers tend to differ from conventional single murderers.

The ordinary murderer is very uniform everywhere in the industrial world. He's very much a bottom of the working class figure, he's addicted to drugs or alcohol, he has no education or professional qualifications. This is the sort of person who, in a fit of rage, kills a friend or a lover. Multiple murders are a little different.

They tend to be more edging towards the middle class in their origins and in their aspirations. And a part of their agenda, of their motivation, is that they devotely wish to join a high-ranking... ...are classed but come to feel excluded. In the case of James Huberti, the mass murderer who killed more than a dozen people in that long siege at the McDonald's in San Diego, Huberti used to stare from his apartment across the street at McDonald's, which was filled with Mexican immigrants.

who were seizing control of this fundamental institution, he thought, of American society, who were able to go there and afford to eat when he couldn't. I tried to argue in a succession of books that these kinds of killers, while their acts are deranged and insane, they themselves are not necessarily so. Rather they are alienated individuals who wish to end their life in a way that allows them to release their grudge against society for their perceived exclusions. Multiple killers may be statistically rare. but I've tried to argue that they represent central cultural themes.

They embody many of the main ideas in their culture, not only the glorification of violence and manly vengeance, but worldly success and worldly... ambition which they feel they've been foiled in. So they're a prime embodiment of their civilization, not a twisted derangement of it. I've also tried to argue that this fundamentally rebellious rather than revolutionary cast to what they're doing, these ghastly killings they perpetrate, are relatively ignored by government institutions charged with regulating society.

They typically pay much more attention to real political deeds. years and spend much less time and energy and money monitoring this small group of killers. I don't believe personally that the answer to psychopathy is to be found in brain altering chemicals to change the nature of our society in that artificial way. I think what we ought to start doing is teaching people about the dignity and value and the sacredness of human life and teaching people how to behave towards one another.

The important thing to understand however is while it's interesting to look into the nature of modern society, it's modern society and see its fissures and fractures and stresses through multiple murderers it should not be considered that these are the primary killers governments and politicians are the main killers indeed some some scholars have argued that the state's primary function is as a mass murderer to wage war on other states and that was how they developed that's the the social impetus for the development of the modern state. So it's kind of disturbing. We don't think of the state in that way, but that's what it is. Hitler and Stalin, between them, killed something like more than 100 million peoples, many of them their own peoples. This small-time, personalized vengeance of a few serial killers and mass killers comes to nothing compared to them.

The real killers are governments. Nowhere is frustration-aggression more apparent. than in modern-day military training. In her study of Japanese atrocities in China, Iris Chang observed that Japanese troops were subjected to particularly severe abuse prior to their deployment.

They were repeatedly slapped for no reason, humiliated in front of their peers, and reduced to a state of impotent rage. It was generally at this point that they would be given a bayonet and instructed to attack the enemy. who is portrayed as a subhuman animal. In America, the same techniques would be adopted, with the emphasis less on physical abuse than verbal. You respond with aye aye sir, do you understand?

Yes sir! Get off my bus right now! Aye sir!

Hurry up! I don't want to have to take the bus! I got no time!

I got no time! Hurry up! I got no time! Hurry up!

I got no time! Hurry up! I got no time! I got no time!

Hurry up! I got no time! Hurry up!

I got no time! I got no time! Hurry up! I got no time!

I got no time! They're scared. That's pretty much what it boils down to.

You have a recruit that has no idea what the Marine Corps is about. It's that initial shock treatment to let them know that this isn't a summer camp, this isn't where people are coming to have a good time, that we got a real job down here and that's making United States marks. My family was poor. I mean, we used to live on dirt, rural. and you know we used to wear sandals most of the time or I mean humble you know we used to probably wash their same clothes two or three times a week because that's basically pretty much what we had I wanted people to see that You know, this is where I come from, and look at me now.

I'm a Marine. I come from the poorer side of town, you know, so anybody else can make it as well. You know, some type of motivation for my little brothers and my little cousins, something they can look forward to. Light them all up.

Come on, fire. Hey, Roger. Keep shooting. Keep shooting. ...shoot....bushmaster two things, bushmaster two things.

Damage, Kyle. Alright, I hit him by the head. Alright, you're clear. Alright, I'm just trying to find targets again. Frustration aggression is one of the most effective ways of managing a population.

By directing a person's rage against selected minorities. or outside enemies, the true cause of an individual's frustration can be effectively diverted. Yet in many ways, the theory is a symptom of something deeper. In order to engender real hatred against a particular group, that group must first be feared. And it is in the realm of fear that behaviorism made its most disturbing contribution.

Hobart Maurer, he would be called a neo-behaviorist, and he trained at the Yale Institute of Human Behavior. And he was quite unusual. I think his background was unusual, and he was also an unusually perceptive and sensitive man. And one of the first and most significant experiments he did was called a preparatory set, in which he had a human being lie down, or usually it was a student, lie down and be attached to electrodes. That would deliver a shock whenever a light went off.

And then, so he would shine the light and then shock the student. And at that point, several people elected to discontinue the experiment. But those who persisted, he would then vary the experiment by showing the light and then not shocking them, or showing the light and shocking them. He would sort of make it unpredictable. And he discovered that people's state of anxiety and fear actually increased when the shock didn't come, when they were just waiting for a shock to come or when they didn't know if a shock would ever come.

And he said it actually created a... atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety and he even called it dread or terror. We have to remind ourselves that we are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world and it turns out planning inside our country to come here and kill us.

He said that that atmosphere could be ratcheted up progressively the more the experiment continued and the more unpredictable the shocks were so that after a while that when the shock came the pain actually was experienced as relief and almost pleasure. by the subject. He called it a nervous breakdown or what he described in another part of the article as the ultimate demoralization of behavior.

What he extracted from this experiment was the idea that there was such a thing as a coercive stimulus that could actually be used to create an environment of dread or terror or anxiety from a low to a high level and that the scientists could actually, it was almost as if they were turning the volume on a stereo, they could decide how much of that atmosphere how intense they would like it to be. Needless to say a creature in a highly fearful environment will be eager to escape to a new environment. This includes human beings. Maurer suggested that new behavior patterns could be quickly created through his techniques.

The prospect of creating new behavior patterns quickly and efficiently became an obsession during the Cold War when the Central Intelligence Agency assumed dominance in the field of mind control experimentation. During the Cold War, the national security state would take the logic of power to its logical conclusion. Known under the umbrella name MK-ULTRA, mind-control experimentation by the CIA would abandon any pretense to morality, leading to a nightmarish search for the holy grail of social engineering, a fully controlled, fully obedient human being.

Coming up on Secrets of the Dead. As World War II winds down, the Allies race to capture Hitler's best scientists and technology. The Black Book had names, targets, places, people. The most important were the scientists, the German scientists. Searching for rockets, planes, nuclear bombs, and the masterminds behind them, each side wants the advantage for the looming Cold War.

The Hunt for Nazi Scientists, next on Secrets of the Dead. The majority of media on the subject of Project Paperclip has centered on German rocket scientists recruited by the United States to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing military supremacy. Hollywood has dealt with the topic in much the same way, often adding humor to the equation. I for one do not intend to go to sleep by the light of a calm in this moon. Now we will be in full control of this pod.

It will go up like a cannonball and come down like a cannonball, splashing down in the water of the ocean with a parachute to spare the life of the spaceman inside. Spaceman? Spaceman. Well, what kind of spaceman?

A tough one? Responsive to orders? I had in mind a jimp. Jimp?

What the hell is a jimp? A jimp? A chimpanzee, Senator. An ape.

The first American into space is not going to be a chimpanzee. Seldom discussed with equal candor is the recruitment of Nazi scientists who specialized in human experimentation. Among them...

were Kurt Blum, who tested sarin nerve gas on prisoners at Auschwitz, and Hermann Becker-Freising, who conducted fatal experiments at Daco. The American people got hold of X number of German scientists, but they immediately ran into a problem. Many of these scientists were classified as war criminals because of their activities during the war, and therefore were not eligible for State Department visas and could not be brought into the United States.

So what the CIA did was create several of these different programs, including Paperclip, and their purpose was to, number one, recruit these scientists, and then, number two, bring them into the U.S. while routing them around the State Department visa requirements. A well-known doctor who came in under Paperclip was Dr. Albertus Strughold, who did experiments during the Second World War that were full Nazi atrocity-type experiments. For instance, they were interested in the effects of high altitude on human beings, so they built a special chamber. They would put a gypsy or homosexual or a Jew or whoever it might be into the chamber and suddenly drop the pressure down to the equivalent of 60,000 feet.

This obviously was excruciating and caused the person to die. And then they would take the guy out of the chamber, dunk his head under water, He cut his skull open underwater to see if there was air bubbles coming out of the arteries in his brain. And so they did dozens and dozens of experiments of this kind. So this guy was brought over under paperclip, became the father of aviation medicine in the United States, worked at an Air Force base in San Antonio, amongst other locations, has a library named after him at one of the Air Force bases in San Antonio, and the Texas state legislature declared an al- Bertus Stroukhold Day in honor of him back in the 70s.

Whether Nazi scientists participated in experiments on Americans after their recruitment by American intelligence remains unknown. What is known is that such experiments became a matter of routine. Some of the studies were relatively harmless, if unethical.

In 1966, the U.S. Army Special Operations Division dispensed a non-toxic bacillus to the New York City subway system by way of cracked light bulbs. Other experiments were not so harmless.

See the pyramids along the... Watch the sunrise from her dropping eyes Just remember darling all the while You belong to me See the marketplace in old Altair Send me photographs and see her in the air Just remember when I dream of you, you belong to me. I'd be so alone without you.

Maybe you'll be lonesome too, blue and blue. Fly the ocean in a silver flight. See the jungle when it's wet with rain Just remember till you're home again You belong to me I'll be so alone without you, maybe you'll be lonesome too, maybe. Fly the ocean in a silver light, see the jungle when it's wet with rain, just remember to get home again.

You belong to me It was in this environment that U.S. mind control experimentation came into being. At the end of the war, the OSS was disbanded, and the same personnel really came together and formed the CIA in 1947. And the first documented CIA mind control programs are Bluebird and Artichoke. Bluebird was signed into operation by the U.S. director of the CIA in April of 1950, which is three months before the start of the Korean War.

So all claims that CIA and U.S. interest in mind control was purely reactive, purely defensive and only in reaction to what the Com... Chinese were doing to downed pilots during the Korean War. All of that is not true disinformation, clearly disproven by the documents.

Artichoke and Bluebird started in 1950, ran into the mid-50s, kind of overlapped with and were rolled into MKUltra, which ran until 1963. MKUltra in turn was rolled over into MKSearch, which ran to the early 70s. And in the 50s, 60s, there's a variety of other programs, MKNaomi. MK Delta, QK Hilltop, Project Offen. So there's a whole set of these projects. And the documentation basically stops in 1973. All programs since then are still classified.

Of particular interest were Nazi research papers by Dr. Kurt Ploutnow from Dachau Concentration Camp. Plotner had found that prisoners, when given high doses of mescaline, openly expressed hatred of their captors while also exhibiting an increased willingness to speak frankly about their own lives. The dream of MK Alter was to come up... with drugs that on the one hand would be sort of an ultimate truth serum that you could give it to a person and they would tell you the truth about anything that you wanted to hear and then on the other hand there would also be some some way to wipe a person's mind clean.

Heading up the CIA's psychochemical experiments would be Sidney Gottlieb. In 1960, when the agency plotted the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, leftist president of the Congo, it was Gottlieb who personally carried the poison to the agency's chief of station via diplomatic pouch. A 1953 memo from Gottlieb states that MK Ultra Subproject 6 is designed to develop a reliable source of lysergic acid derivatives within the US. The problem of supply was solved in October 1954, when Eli Lilly and Company, now known for manufacturing Prozac, succeeded in synthesizing LSD. This pill can solve all of your problems.

It's called Prozac, and it may mean the end of depression as we know it. A special memorandum was rushed to CIA Director Alan Dulles on October 26th, and an unlimited supply of the drug was now available to be purchased by, and in some cases used against, the American taxpayer. As with the behaviorists, they started with animals. Here, we see millions of years of evolution turned upside down when a cat is given LSD.

Soldiers came next. I feel incapacitated. I'm not used to it yet.

One of the first major studies was conducted at the Edgewood Chemical Facility in Maryland, where approximately 7,000 US soldiers served as unwitting guinea pigs. They were given drugs such as LSD, mescaline, BZ, and PCP, then instructed to perform various tasks. Looking back at early behaviorist experiments, the analogies were obvious. Under the CIA and the Pentagon, what was good enough for rats was good enough for the U.S.

Armed Forces. More than 1,000 of the soldiers emerged with mental health problems. Some attempted suicide. No compensation was offered.

In a later experiment, and with the full approval of the National Institute of Health, Gottlieb arranged funding for a project at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington. Heroin addicts, mainly young black men, were kept on LSD for an incredible 77 days, a feat described by the center's director, Harris Isbell, as the most amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever seen. But...

They would not stop there. Segment three this evening is titled The Children and the CIA. We've learned a lot of unknown activities of the CIA in years past, some of them disturbing, to say the least.

Tonight, we'll learn of the agency's interest in children. Paul Altmyer of our investigative unit has assembled these facts. These are home movies taken in the 1950s at a European camp of the Children's International Summer Village.

A program designed to bring together children from around the world for a better understanding of one another. NBC News has learned that the CIA was studying these youngsters, some as young as 11, as possible future recruits. The studies took place at summer camps in Hennepest, Norway and Vienna, Austria in 1959 and 1960. According to CIA documents we have examined, this was sub-project 103 of the agency's top secret MK-ULTRA program. San Antonio, Texas. NBC News has also learned that the CIA paid for a study of adolescents here, and in two other Texas cities, Austin and El Paso, in 1958 and 1959. It was a study of how youngsters behave without adult supervision.

This study, MKUltra Subproject 102, refers to data being collected on 462 subjects in seven secondary schools. No child is identified by name. One of the most revered child psychiatrists in the entire 20th century of American psychiatry was Dr. Loretta Bender.

She had a full-page obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry. And that only happens occasionally. You have to be really a high-ranking person to have a full-page obituary.

And she's famous for the Bender-Gestalt test, which is a... widely used psychological test. So, not everybody in the mental health field knows exactly who she is, but all psychology graduate students have heard of Bender Gestalt.

And she was a child psychiatrist charged with the care and treatment of children. And she operated at Creedmoor State Hospital in New York in the 60s. Her funding source is not stated in her papers, so where she got the LSD from and whether she was directly funded by the military or the CIA is not documented. But she attended many CIA-sponsored LSD symposia, talked with, was on panels with, interacted with most of the leading CIA and military LSD contractors. So I would say it's unbelievable that she didn't know that all of this was basically run by the CIA and the military.

And what she did, again, is not the mad scientist hidden in the basement somewhere. These are papers in leading psychiatry journals. Where she as the author describes children as young as five getting LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, other hallucinogens in street level type doses for days, weeks, months, and in some cases years at a time.

Under the rationale that somehow this was going to be helpful treatment. Again, no real follow up how many of these kids went psychotic. How did it affect their chromosomes? What was with their mental health from there on?

So this is the kind of experimentation that you would think would be impossible, it would never happen. Somebody who claimed that would just be in need of treatment themselves. But not only is it documented, it was published in the literature, and nobody seemed to be upset.

Nobody complained to the American Psychiatric Association. Nobody reported it to anybody. It was just business as usual.

the use of children in barbaric mind control experiments shows an evolution from the early behaviorists to the c i a mind doctors once the doctrine of national security had been invoked ethical considerations received little or no attention almost anything could be justified by claiming the communists might be engaged in similar activities You've got to be able to take it. Your body's got to be able to take it. Because service means new physical demands on strength and endurance.

During the Korean War in 1953, during the cessation of the war, American soldiers were returned home who had been prisoners of war in China. They started exhibiting very strange behavior. When the boat neared the shore, they were not very happy to come home. Even the sight of their mother's outstretched arms seemingly failed to move them.

They were sort of stone-faced. They would start spouting communist propaganda. Some of them had seemed to have been converted to communism, and even 21 Air Force personnel had been persuaded to stay in Korea and start families there.

My name is Harold Webb. What's on the floor? My name is Aaron Wilson, from Urania, Louisiana. This is a very happy moment for me, for now I am free.

In small or large ways they had collaborated or cooperated or allowed themselves to be coerced by the enemy. Many sociologists and psychiatrists and psychologists who both worked for the army or worked for institutions like universities were brought together in teams to study why this was happening. And one of the people who headed one of the teams was named Louis Jolion West. And he was a talented American psychiatrist who was working for the army, and he headed a team that studied the returned soldiers from what was called Operation Little Switch, and these soldiers were displaying some of that behavior. And so they were trying to figure out what exactly had happened.

They concluded that if it was brainwashing, it was not the typical kind of notion of what people think brainwashing is, which is some magical hocus-pocus where the person... loses their mind and like changing the software on a computer one day they're good old-fashioned americans and the next day they're these kind of rabid communists but instead they were describing a process that much more resembled slow steady classical behavioral conditioning so they came up with the words ddd for debility dependency and dread stability was basically that they had been put in a situation where their Their wounds weren't treated and their health was low and they weren't fed very well, so they kind of developed a chronic debility, and sometimes they developed a condition that other soldiers called give-up-itis, where they would just simply lie down and refuse to take food and water and just die. And the second was dependency, that these soldiers were made to be extremely dependent on their captors for any kind of reward or any kind of, even anything resembling a small comfort or luxury, or even just... food to keep them alive, they were dependent on their captors, so that created in a way a kind of intimate bond.

And then the third D was for dread, which was an atmosphere of fear and terror and constant unpredictability where the prisoner would never be sure what was going to happen next. They could be kept awake for 48 hours or a week, they could be given a drug or not, they could be given food or not, they never knew when that would be coming. And they never knew if their captors would be treating them decently or not, so there was an atmosphere of this kind of extreme unpredictability.

And all of that together was what they called DDD, which they said could basically be explained through behavioral principles. And what it resulted in was a dismantling of the self, or a demoralization of, to go back to Maurer's idea, the ultimate demoralization of behavior. While the purpose of the study was to find out about communist brainwashing techniques, CIA documents show that the agency was interested in developing mind control methods of its own.

Jolly West would eventually achieve celebrity status in conspiracy culture for becoming the first, and one can only hope, the last man to kill an elephant by way of LSD. The elephant's name was Tusko. He resided at the Oklahoma City Zoo and died after a cartridge containing 3,000 times the accepted human dose of LSD was fired into his rump.

West also served as a defense witness in the trial of Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the self-proclaimed Symbionese Liberation Army and brainwashed into robbing banks. There's some feeling among experts, and particularly her family, that Patricia Hearst was brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army. One thing cited to substantiate that is that two known SLA members, including the slain leader Donald DeVries, were... inmates at a California prison where sophisticated methods of mind control are practiced on some prisoners. And drugs are a vital part of therapy here.

Everything from sleeping pills to Prolixin, a heavy tranquilizer used to control control schizophrenics. What concerns the critics of prison therapy, however, is the danger that the tools of modern psychiatry can also be applied to a captive prison population for convenience instead of treatment. Not to make sick inmates better, but simply to make them behave. In his 1973 State of the State message, then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical facility at Vacaville.

It would be called the Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence, and would use techniques pioneered by José Delgado. Delgado had gained worldwide fame for stopping a charging bull in its tracks by using a gadget he called a stimoceiver, a remote-controlled device that triggered electric impulses in the animal's brain. Neurophysicist Dr. Jose Delgado was financed by the Office of Naval Research.

Were you sure that that bill was going to stop as it approached you when you pushed the right button? Scientists always should have faith in science. I have faith in science. Recently released CIA documents refer to the feasibility of remote control of animals and that special investigations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man.

In Delgado's papers, he's basically implanting electrodes in the brains of human beings and experimental animals. In one of these papers, he refers to the animals as mechanical toys. In the Harvard team, there's pictures of a 16-year-old girl. In one picture she's staring off into nowhere with a bland, empty expression on her face. In another picture she's strumming on her guitar.

In another picture she's furiously pounding on the wall, all totally controlled by which button? is pushed in the neurotransmitter box. When you open somebody's brain like this and you put an electrode in and you keep it in for a long period of time, you're exposing that person to the risk of brain infections, meningitis, seizures, and death. For prison officials at Vacaville, the idea of controlling inmates through remote control was a tempting prospect, and drafting the outlines of the new program was none other than Jolly West. West's proposal recommended psychosurgery as a tool for controlling prison populations and the risk of brain infections.

and crime. Remarkably, he also recommended using schools in Chicano and African American neighborhoods to screen for possible, quote, genetic defects. The project was terminated, but only after public outrage forced officials to backtrack.

West's research would lead to new dreams of what he called the psychophysiology of conditioning. West noticed that DDD bore an interesting resemblance to post-lobotomy syndrome, as well as altered states of consciousness produced by certain drugs, hypnosis, and mental diseases like schizophrenia. In all of these cases, the notion of self, of free will, is displaced by something more obscure.

In West's words, the patient loses all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a space-time image, which served to explain the events of the day to him. With these ideas in mind, large funds were poured into the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, headed by Scottish-born psychiatrist Ewan Cameron. A future president of the World Psychiatric Association, Cameron set out to actualize the new vision of total control.

He would create real-life blank slates out of his patients by wiping their minds clean and destroying their very notions of self. From there, new behavior patterns could conceivably be built upon the wreckage of their former identities. The Allen Memorial Institute at the time was probably the leading academic center of psychiatry in Canada, attached to McGill University. And the chairman of McGill University, this is, we're in the 50s into the 60s now, was Dr. and Cameron, originally born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada.

He had money from the CIA under MKUltra to do two basic things, a kind of brainwashing in which he would, for many years, be a political leader. months in a row administer massive massive amounts of electric shock to a person Linda McDonald she got over a hundred electric shock treatments in a period of four or five months each time the button was pushed six times instead of once so the electricity delivered to her brain was over 600 normal electric shock treatments also people would get prolonged sleep induced by barbiturates tranquilizers antipsychotics and so on. So this is the de-patterning.

And what would happen from this massive shock and drug-induced... ...asleep is what happened to Linda McDonald. She went into the hospital in the spring, slightly depressed, otherwise perfectly normal, functioning intact person with five kids.

By August she was incontinent of urine and feces. unable to feed herself, didn't know her name, didn't know where she was, didn't know what year it was, didn't recognize her husband, and didn't recognize her children. So it's a complete wiping clean of the brain.

what they call the sleep room and they gave me all of these electro convulsive shock treatments and mega doses of drugs and lsd and all of that and i have no memory of any of that nothing in the in of of that time in the allen memorial or any of my life previous to that all gone wiped when she was released she had to very laboriously learn how to play guitar how to boil an egg you how to keep track of her kids. And this was the purpose of the experimentation. And obviously the CIA was interested in this only for one purpose, which is if they had somebody and they wanted to wipe out their memories, would this method work? And Ewan Cameron proved that it could.

Building up the new identity was called psychic driving. And one of the techniques was they played either in Ewan Cameron's voice, one of the other doctors'voices, or in the person's own voice, they played the voice of the person. these tape loops literally tens of thousands of times over and over and over and over delivering whatever message it was they wanted the person to believe. One of the disinformation cover stories about all of this is, well first of all it never happened, but then when it comes to light and there's lawsuits and publicity, then the next level of cover story is, well that was back then, that was a different time, different stuff.

standards applied. We wouldn't do that today. But actually, in fact, all the ethical standards of 2010 applied absolutely at the end of the Second World War and applied back in ancient Roman Greece.

They were clearly unethical, immoral, destructive, unprofessional, harmful to the brains and to the lives of the subjects. In some of the experiments, not the ones at McGill but other ones, as reported by the doctors in papers in psychiatric journals. In some of the experiments people died.

In other experiments they went psychotic, they were then treated with shock therapy. So long-lasting psychotic reactions, worsening of symptoms, creation of new symptoms, and in some cases death, are described by the doctors in their own papers where they're discussing the research. During the Cold War, and this is up until the early seventies when the documentation stops and everything is classified, the There was extensive, systematic, pervasive, structured contracting by the leading figures of psychiatry and the leading medical schools with the CIA at the top secret clearance level.

The typical universities on the list would include Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Tulane, UCLA, University of Minnesota, Denver University, and so on. So it was not just some mad scientist in a basement somewhere. Therapeutically speaking, the experiments of the MK Ultra psychiatrists were complete failure.

Yet, they were useful in at least one respect. The manual is called Kubark. Dated 1963, it is a how-to guide compiled by the CIA for interrogating suspects.

In other words, a torture manual. Referring explicitly to early behaviorist experiments, as well as Cameron's studies at McGill, it describes a phenomenon whereby the deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world, and thus forcing it upon itself. As the interrogate slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned, or structured personality traits fall away. Rather than red hot pincers, iron maidens, and racks, the tools of choice would become the stress position, sensory deprivation, and electroshock.

Manuals that they wrote, which were based on the earlier behavioral experiments, were directly adopted during the War on Terror. What happened was, during the 70s and 80s, these manuals had spread in Latin America and other places for... used in counterinsurgency movements and these techniques had never really gone out of favor.

So if you look at Guantanamo Bay, as of five years into the war, there had been 10 to 20,000 interrogations that took place there. So you hear about the extreme interrogations, but what was really going on was a kind of routinization of the process of interrogating people and creating these environments in which they never knew. If it was day or night, if it was going to be cold or hot, if they would be subjected to loud music or terrible babies crying or Sesame Street, it was a completely unpredictable environment that created an atmosphere of stability, dread, and dependency. And that also is linked to the importing of people called behavioral science consultants, or BISCOTs, who were often anthropologists or psychologists who would...

Come and kind of oversee and monitor these interrogations. Many decades later, the U.S. government's mind control projects retain an aura of mystery. Former CIA director Richard Helms claims to have shredded most of the remaining documentation. Yet Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer, claims the congressional subcommittee which went into this got only the barest glimpse of the U.S. government's attempt to control.

the human mind. Whatever the case, exotic mind control techniques would not be required for the ultimate goal of controlling the opinions and behavior of the American public. The answer would come in the form of a small flickering box. The behaviorist Ivan Pavlov was the first scientist to explain why moving images are so attractive to human beings.

We instinctively react to any sudden or novel visual stimuli because of our biological orienting system. In evolutionary terms, this was and is necessary both for exploration of our environment and for defense against potential predators. Television not only entertains the mind, it relaxes the body.

This has been confirmed by EEG readings of viewers'brainwaves as they watch television programs and advertising. In the hands of skilled media professionals, moving images create an effect roughly akin to hypnosis, producing passivity, a lowered level of alertness, and increased suggestibility. But some will get through to your home.

During the Cold War and beyond, television programming would increasingly resemble an experiment in fear-based conditioning applied on a global scale. The thesis of John B. Watson, that fear, not love, is the guiding force in human society, would no longer be confined to the realm of theory. It would become our reality.

There's no Q inside Inside of Sirens Inside of Sirens The song's alone You must always write. I remember the first year you were constantly telling me when I'd tell you how the experiment should go, you'd say, now, now, wait, let the pigeon tell you. That's right, the pigeon did tell us to guard the pigeons. That's why I said that really our behavior was shaped by the pigeons much more than vice versa.

Pigeons taught us much more than we ever taught them.